Price Competition and Reputation in Markets for Experience Goods: An Experimental Study* We experimentally examine the effects of price competition in markets for experience goods where sellers can build up reputations for quality. We compare price competition to monopolistic markets and markets where prices are exogenously fixed (somewhere between the endogenous oligopoly and monopoly prices)....

Wheat is one of the most strategic agricultural products, which has always been a significant issue for the government. The main purpose of this study is to review the policy of purchasing wheat on the welfare of producers and customers in Iran. Due to the significance of wheat in consuming model of Iranian families, this product has been permanently under consideration. The government grants a...

Price coordination can be very harmful for consumers. Yet, even if a cartel is proved to exist, and successful in enforcement, how do we estimate damages or price overcharges to consumers? We build a structural model of the Irish automobile market that avails of a crosssection of new cars and jointly estimate demand and cost primitives. We use these estimates to quantify the role that price coo...

Diamond's 'paradox' (1971) showed that in a market where consumers search sequentially and have strictly positive search costs the unique price equilibrium is where all firms charge the monopoly price. This paper demonstrates that Diamond's result depends crucially on the assumption of single commodity search and does not persist when the model is generalised to allow multi-commodity search. A ...

Although consumer profiling advocates tout benefits from personalization, consumer advocacy groups oppose profiling in online markets because of concerns about privacy and price discrimination. Policies such as opt-out or opt-in that provide consumers the option to voluntarily participate in profiling are the favored compromise. We compare voluntary profiling to no profiling and show that volun...

the study investigates consumers’ preference for cowpea reflected in the nigerian markets through price discounts and premiums that consumers pay for different cowpea characteristics. the price data used for this study were obtained through a market survey. a common data collection protocol was employed. every month, between october 2009 to december 2010, five cowpea samples per seller were bou...

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We consider a sequential search model with two types of consumers: (‘high cost’s) consumers who incur a positive search cost at each visit and informed consumers who visit all the firms at no cost. The objective is to compare Nash market predictions with a market with adaptive sellers using reinforcement learning. Simulation Results show that Reinforcement Learning never converges to Nash equil...